Indian Mathematics

The Navna-Nyaya School

The Navna-Nyaya school was a school of logic founded by Gangesha Upadhaya in the 13th century. This school consisted of two schools, the Mithila school and the Navadvipa school. Mathematicians belonging to the Mithila school included Gangesha Upadhyaya, Pakshadhara, and Shankara Mishra, while those belonging to the Navadvipa school included Vasudeva Sarvabhauma, Raghunatha Shiromani, Mathuranatha Tarkavagisha, Jagadisha Tarkalankara, and Gadadhara Bhattacharya. Roughly speaking, the Navna-Nyaya school concerned itself with objects, qualifiers, and relations, and thus can be considered a basis for modern predicate logic.

Modern Indian Mathematics (1600 - present)

Much of modern mathematics was developed in India. Munishvara (17th century) produced accurate sine tables. Kamalakara (1616-1700) wrote the Siddhanta-tattva-viveka in 1658. This was an astronomical atlas which included various trigonometric identities. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893-1972) performed pioneering work in statistics. Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974) was a mathematical physicist who derived Bose-Einstein statistics obeyed by particles called bosons. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995) derived the limiting mass of a white dwarf star (the Chandrasekhar limit, equal to approximately 1.4 solar masses), beyond which a collapsing star undergoes a supernova explosion and becomes a neutron star.

Perhaps the most famous modern Indian mathematician was Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920). Besides proving some remarkable theorems, he had an incredible gift for mathematical insight, in which he often came up wish some amazing formulas which were later proven to be true. His main area of expertese was number theory. He proved theorems and made discoveries in the areas of gamma functions, modular forms, continued fractions, and prime number theory. In addition, he derived some remarkable series for pi, which are used today in some of the fastest computer algorithms.